Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to 2 Samuel · About this commentary
Would I Had Died Instead of You
2 Samuel 18:19-33
19 Then Ahimaaz the son of Zadok said, “Let me now run and carry the king news, how Yahweh has avenged him of his enemies.” · WEB
Two runners race to deliver news neither wants to say plainly — and a victorious king climbs to a room over the gate and grieves like a father.
"You must not be the bearer of news today... because the king's son is dead" 2 Samuel 18:20.
Joab knows what this message is worth to the man carrying it, and protects the priest's son by sending a foreign runner instead. It is genuine consideration from the man who created the situation, which is exactly the mixture Joab always is.
"He is a good man, and comes with good news" 2 Samuel 18:27.
The scene at the gate is one of the most finely told in Scripture: a king sitting between the two gates, a watchman calling down the sightings, one runner then two, and a father reading hope into a running man's gait. Every word is about the battle and every thought is about one person.
The king said, "Is it well with the young man Absalom?" 2 Samuel 18:29.
He asks it twice, once of each messenger, and the wording never changes. Ahimaaz — who outran the Cushite to get here and now finds he cannot say it — reports a tumult he did not understand and is told to stand aside. The Cushite gives the answer in the polite indirect form of the age: may the enemies of my lord the king... be as that young man is 2 Samuel 18:32. Both men have won a war and neither can look the king in the face.
"My son Absalom! My son, my son Absalom! I wish I had died instead of you, Absalom, my son, my son!" 2 Samuel 18:33.
The name eight times in one verse, and no word about the kingdom. It is the rawest sound of grief in the Old Testament, and it comes from a man who has just been delivered from a son who tried to kill him. The wish is impossible and it is not empty: David would rather be dead than have this, and he says so in front of everyone.
The grief is also complicated in ways the chapter leaves standing. He is weeping for a murderer he never judged, whose crime he passed over 2 Samuel 13:21, whose return he half-granted and never completed 2 Samuel 14:24. Some of what he mourns he made. And Joab's brutal rebuke in the next chapter — that the army who saved his life is creeping home like men ashamed — is coming, and is not wrong 2 Samuel 19:5–6.
But a father who could have said he brought it on himself says instead I wish I had died instead of you, and Scripture does not correct him for it. The wish to die in a rebellious son's place is the nearest thing in the Old Testament to what the New says God did Romans 5:8 — with the difference that David only wished it.
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